A colorful crowd sat in a room of Clark College’s computer technology wing Thursday night. About half of the 20 students were the usual suspects — aspiring programmers or web developers.

But the rest of the class included a fashion-design student, an addiction counselor-in-training, a school district employee and several others who don’t necessarily intend to write computer code for a living.

The mixed group was drawn in by software that’s running more and more of what people see online and by a woman who has been an apostle for that software since its early days.

Clark College rolled out its first “Introduction to WordPress” course this week. The course made for some online conversations in the blogging community, because it is very rare for a for-credit class to focus only on WordPress and because it is taught by blogging pioneer Lorelle VanFossen.

The course — CTEC 280 — is a temporary offering. It will be available again in the spring quarter, but would need to be vetted at the campus and state level before it could become a permanent entry in the college catalog. If it gets positive feedback from students and buy-in from administrators, the course may not only become permanent but be the foundation of a whole new associate degree program down the road.

WordPress has become ubiquitous and knowing it can be a great benefit for many careers. And it’s fun, apparently.

Thanks so much to Robert Hughes, head of the Computer Technology department at Clark College, for taking a huge risk in making WordPress such an important part of the curriculum this year, The Columbian and Jacques Von Lunen, Columbian staff writer, for taking so much time to talk to all of us and help us promote this exciting next step in WordPress education and outreach. I’d like to personally thank Aaron Hockley and Andrew Spittle for their friendship as well as their support and kind words to Jacques. These two are a huge part of the success in WordPress in general as well as here in the Portland, Oregon, area.

Most of all, I’d like to thank the students who suffered the intrusion of the reporter and photographer in the class with style and grace. They are the true heroes of this story as they have seen the future, it’s WordPress, and they wanted to be the first in line.